Prayers and liturgy

The Sunday Next Before Advent

Anthony van Dyck, Salvator MundiThe collect for today, the Sunday Next before Advent, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

STIR up, we beseech thee, O Lord, the wills of thy faithful people; that they, plenteously bringing forth the fruit of good works, may of thee be plenteously rewarded; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

The Lesson: Jeremiah 23:5-8
The Gospel: St. John 1:35-45

Artwork: Anthony van Dyck, Salvator Mundi, c. 1620. Oil on canvas, Bildergalerie von Sanssouci, Potsdam, Germany.

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Prayers and liturgy

Clement, Bishop of Rome

The collect for today, the Feast of Saint Clement (c. 30-c. 100), Bishop of Rome, Martyr (source):

St Clement window, St Olave's Hart Street, LondonEternal Father, creator of all,
whose martyr Clement bore witness with his blood
to the love that he proclaimed and the gospel that he preached:
give us thankful hearts as we celebrate thy faithfulness,
revealed to us in the lives of thy saints,
and strengthen us in our pilgrimage as we follow thy Son,
Jesus Christ our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: 2 Timothy 2:1-7
The Gospel: St Luke 6:37-45

Saint Clement was one of the first leaders of the church in the period immediately after the apostles. Some commentators believe that he is the Clement mentioned in Philippians 4:3. If so, he was a companion and fellow-worker of Paul. The Roman Catholic Church regards him as the fourth pope.

St. Clement is best known for his Epistle to the Corinthians, dated to about 95. Clement addressed some of the same issues that Paul had addressed in his first letter to the Corinthians. The church at Corinth apparently still had problems with internal dissension and challenges to those in authority. Clement reminds them of the importance of Christian unity and love, and that church leaders serve for the good of the whole body.

Although the letter was written in the name of the Church at Rome to the Church at Corinth, St. Clement’s authorship is attested by early church writers. This epistle was held in very high regard in the early church; some even placed it on a par with the canonical writings of the New Testament.

Artwork: Saint Clement, stained glass, St Olave’s Church, Hart Street, London. Photo taken by admin, 24 August 2004.

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Prayers and liturgy

Cecilia, Virgin and Martyr

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Cecilia (3rd century), Virgin, Martyr (source):

Gracious God, whose servant Cecilia didst serve thee in song: Grant us to join her hymn of praise to thee in the face of all adversity, and to suffer gladly for the sake of our Lord Jesus Christ; who liveth and reigneth with thee and the Holy Spirit, one God, for ever and ever. Amen.

The Lesson: Revelation 15:1-4
The Gospel: St. Luke 10:38-42

Wilhelm Volz, Saint CeciliaAccording to Cecilia’s late 5th-century Legend, she was a Roman martyr of the early 3rd century. However, she is not mentioned in any 3rd- or 4th-century Christian martyrologies or other writings, so almost nothing about her is known for certain.

Her Legend says that she was betrothed without her consent to a pagan nobleman, but refused to consummate the marriage because she had dedicated herself to God. Her husband and his brother both became Christians and were martyred. Cecilia was subsequently brought before the authorities and martyred for refusing to sacrifice to Roman gods.

A church built in the Trastavere district of Rome in the 5th century by a wealthy widow named Cecilia became associated with the saint. The church of Saint Cecilia-in-Trastavere, soon reputed to have been the site of Cecilia’s martyrdom, was rebuilt in the 9th century. Important artworks were added in medieval and modern times, including a fresco of The Last Judgment (1289-93) by Pietro Cavallini. A life-size marble statue of a girl lying on her side, as if asleep, entitled The Martyrdom of Saint Cecilia, by Stefano Maderno, was completed in 1601 and placed in front of the high altar.

Cecilia has been patron saint of music and of musicians since at least the Middle Ages. This connection originated from the 5th-century account of her marriage, where, as the organs played, she is said to have silently sung, “O let my heart be unsullied, so that I be not confounded”.

She was chosen patron of the Academy of Music in Rome (founded 1584) and many other musical organisations. In artwork, she is often depicted with an organ or other musical instrument.

Artwork: Wilhelm Volz, Saint Cecilia, 1893. Oil on canvas, Staatliche Kunsthalle Karlsruhe, Karlsruhe, Germany.

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KES Chapel Weekly Reflections

KES Chapel Reflection, Week of 21 November

You shall love your neighbour as yourself

The juxtaposition of Isaiah’s prophecy about the coming of a Messianic kingdom, imaged in terms of Paradise Restored, with a passage from the Holiness Code of Leviticus is quite striking. Leviticus, perhaps the most forbidding and most misunderstood (though least read) of the Books of the Torah, the Law, provides scriptural ground for a most significant feature of the Law as the ethical or moral code for our humanity, namely, the love of neighbour.

The love of God commanded in Deuteronomy and elsewhere is complemented by the love of neighbour. They go together and in the Christian liturgies are known as the ‘Summary of the Law’ upon which two commandments hang everything else in both the Law and the Prophets, ethically and spiritually. What is striking and not a little intriguing is how both Isaiah and Leviticus essentially provide a commentary on the stories of Creation and the Fall in Genesis. They both highlight the important biblical and theological question about how we read and what we read and in what way.

Leviticus, at first glance, seems to be a random collection of rules and regulations governing human behaviour; in short, our actions towards one another and, importantly, our use of creation. With respect to the latter, it builds upon the clear sense of creation as the distinguishing of one thing from another within the unity of the whole order of things. It adds to this by distinguishing between things clean and things unclean and forbidding the consumption of the latter. What makes certain creatures unclean? As the sociologist Mary Douglas noted, it has entirely to do with clarity or lack of clarity about the distinctive features of each created thing. Creatures that cross the boundaries represent a kind of confusion of categories in relation to what belongs to land or sea, to insects or animals, and so forth. This simply illustrates the logic behind the dietary laws of the Mosaic covenant.

In other words, there is a logic at work about how one thinks about different creatures and about their distinguishing features or their confusion of features. Some parts of Leviticus are controversial, for instance, for those who identify as LGBTQ+. Later, the idea of things being unclean will be challenged by emphasising how all things in creation are clean and therefore embraced within the essential goodness of creation as a whole. But the logic of distinguishing one thing from another is not negated. In what is known as the Holiness Code in Leviticus the strong ethical claim is that Israel is to be holy as God is holy. That leads to a whole way of acting in the world that equally concerns our relationship with one another and our use of nature.

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Prayers and liturgy

Edmund, King and Martyr

The collect for today, the Feast of St. Edmund (841-869), King of the East Angles, Martyr (source):

Walpole St. Peter, St. EdmundO eternal God,
whose servant Edmund kept faith to the end,
both with thee and with his people,
and glorified thee by his death:
grant us the same steadfast faith,
that, together with the noble army of martyrs,
we may come to the perfect joy of the resurrection life;
through Jesus Christ thy Son our Lord,
who liveth and reigneth with thee,
in the unity of the Holy Spirit,
one God, now and for ever.

The Epistle: 1 St. Peter 3:14-18
The Gospel: St. Matthew 10:16-22

Edmund was raised a Christian and became king of the East Angles as a young boy, probably when 14 years old. In 869 the Danes invaded his territory and defeated his forces in battle.

According to Edmund’s first biographer, Abbo of Fleury, the Danes tortured the saint to death after he refused to renounce his faith and rule as a Danish vassal. He was beaten, tied to a tree and pierced with arrows, and then beheaded.

His body was originally buried near the place of his death and subsequently transferred to Baedericesworth, modern Bury St. Edmunds. His shrine became one of the most popular pilgrimage sites in England, but it was destroyed and his remains lost during the English Reformation.

The cult of St. Edmund became very popular among English nobility because he exemplified the ideals of heroism, political independence, and Christian holiness. The Benedictine Abbey founded at Bury St. Edmunds in 1020 became one of the greatest in England.

Click here to read Fr. David Curry’s sermon for the Feast of St. Edmund.

Artwork: Saint Edmund, stained glass. St. Peter’s Church, Walpole St. Peter, Norfolk, England. Photograph taken by admin, 3 October 2014.

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Prayers and liturgy

Audio file of 8:00am Holy Communion service, Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Trinity

Click here to listen to an audio recording of the 8:00am service of Holy Communion at Christ Church on the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Trinity.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Trinity, 10:30am Morning Prayer

“An attentive ear is the wise man’s desire”

It is, as Shakespeare puts it, “that time of year when yellow leaves or few or none do hang upon those boughs which shake against the cold, bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang”. His words are suggestive and belong to one of the most important and yet most neglected aspects of our humanity, remembering. November is the grey month of our remembering, a remembering of our end in God in the Communion of Saints; in short, our vocation as the children of God. Yet this includes our remembering too of the harsh and hard realities of sin and evil, of war and destruction signalled by Remembrance Day last Monday. It is really a kind of secular All Souls’ day.

“Bare ruin’d choirs”. It could be a metaphor for what T.S. Eliot called the Waste Land, the waste land of modernity following upon the carnage of the First World and its legacy of death and destruction that continues to haunt us. Shakespeare may be alluding to the literal ruins of the choirs of the English monasteries through their dissolution by Henry VIII between 1536 and 1541, the confiscation of church properties by the State. But he is also reflecting on the passage of time, of aging, of the personal realities of dying and death. Momento mori, a remembering of our common mortality is an important feature of what belongs to our humanity. It is not simply morbid and negative but reflective in the sense that it opens us out to something more and something greater. At least that is the kind of holy remembering that is set before us in this time of endings and beginnings. They recall us to what is eternal and abiding even in the face of the sins and evils of ourselves and our world. A remembering which is ultimately restorative and healing.

“But remember – for that’s my business to you”, Ariel says in a famous scene in The Tempest that seeks to convict the consciences of “ye three men of sin”: Alonso, Antonio and Sebastian. They are meant to remember how they sought the harm of Prospero and Miranda, having usurped Prospero’s dukedom of Milan. Yet, as Ariel indicates, this remembering which is a calling to account is “nothing but heart’s sorrow”, meaning repentance, “and a clear life ensuing”. In the judgement there is mercy and truth, grace and hope through the greater power of forgiveness. This is the same point that Luke is making in this morning’s second lesson.

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Sermons

Sermon for the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Trinity, 8:00am Holy Communion

“Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising /
Thou understandest my thoughts from afar”

The year runs out with the themes of judgment and mercy. There is the sense of apocalypse. The Gospel for today is sometimes called the “Matthaean Apocalypse”. That section of his gospel deals with the sense of the end-time and the theme of judgment. We are also, in the offices of Morning and Evening Prayer, reading from those books which take their place between the Old Testament and the New Testament sometimes called collectively the Apocrypha. These writings contain various forms of apocalyptic literature. The term “apocrypha” literally means “things hidden away”; the words “apocalyptic” and “apocalypse”, on the other hand, refer to what is revealed or uncovered. They call us to reflection, to a kind of remembering upon which all our thinking depends, namely, the wisdom of God in moral teachings and in the order of creation.

In general, what we confront is the uncovering of all things from the standpoint of God, a consideration of how things stand in the sight of God’s all-knowing, absolute and total judgment. In particular, what we confront is the unveiling of our souls and lives in the light of God’s truth revealed in Jesus Christ.

There is nothing soft and sentimental about any of this. Quite the contrary, it may seem terribly harsh and perfectly dreadful. We all cringe at the idea of death and judgment. But that is to miss the point. The judgment is itself the mercy. We are reminded – strongly reminded – that our lives are lived in the sight of God “from whom no secrets are hid”, as we say at every mass. It is, too, the very point which the psalmist makes: “Thou knowest my downsitting and mine uprising/Thou understandest my thoughts from afar”. Nothing falls outside of God’s eternal knowing and loving.

We are reminded that who we are is altogether bound up in his Word and Will for us. “Behold what manner of love the Father hath bestowed upon us, that we should be called the sons of God, and so we are”, as St. John puts it in the Epistle for this day. The question is, will we resist and deny, or will we accept and follow? Will we acknowledge the struggle and allow ourselves to be called to account?

The judgment is not something external and arbitrary. It has altogether to do with the truth of our thoughts and actions, the unveiling, as it were, of our true intentions. That, of course, can be most terrifying if we are simply left with the terror of our own knowledge of our own intentions. Our hearts are exposed by God’s truth. We stand convicted of all manner of evil intent, all manner of angry, dark, malicious, lustful, and hurtful thoughts, not to mention deeds and actions.

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Events, Month at a Glance

Week at a Glance, 18 – 24 November

Tuesday, November 19th
7:00pm Christ Church Book Club – Coronation Room, Parish Hall: The End of Everything: How Wars Descend into Annihilation, Victor Davis Hanson, 2024, and The Greek Histories: The Sweeping History of Ancient Greece, ed. Mary Lefkowitz and James Room, 2024.

Sunday, November 24, Sunday Next Before Advent
8:00am Holy Communion
10:30am Holy Communion

Upcoming Event:

Tuesday, December 3rd
7:00pm Boxing up Seafarers’ Campaign contributions – Parish Hall

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Prayers and liturgy

The Twenty-Fifth Sunday After Trinity

The collect for today, the Twenty-Fifth Sunday after Trinity, from The Book of Common Prayer (Canadian, 1962):

O GOD, whose blessed Son was manifested that he might destroy the works of the devil, and make us the sons of God, and heirs of eternal life: Grant us, we beseech thee, that, having this hope, we may purify ourselves, even as he is pure; that, when he shall appear again with power and great glory, we may be made like unto him in his eternal and glorious kingdom; where with thee, O Father, and thee, O Holy Ghost, he liveth and reigneth, ever one God, world without end. Amen.

The Epistle: 1 St. John 3:1-8
The Gospel: St. Matthew 24:23-31

Domenico Fetti, Parable of the Sower of TaresArtwork: Domenico Fetti, Parable of the Sower of Tares, 1620-21. Oil on panel, The Courtauld, London.

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